March 2021

AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. Snowball Edge Compute Optimized is a secure, rugged device that brings AWS computing and storage capabilities, such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, AWS IoT Greengrass, AWS Lambda functions, and AWS IAM to your edge environments for machine learning, data analytics, processing, and local storage. You can use Snowball Edge devices in environments with intermittent connectivity (like manufacturing, industrial, and transportation) or in extremely remote locations (like military or maritime operations). These devices may also be rack mounted and clustered together to build larger installations.

Customers who bring in private classroom training for their teams now have new options to supplement the in-course labs and instruction with an AWS Jam event. Seven of our popular three-day instructor-led courses are now available with an optional fourth day—an AWS Jam event—with gamified challenges to match the topics and services covered in the course. These are curated and instructor-facilitated to maximize learning and build your team’s capability in the AWS Cloud. These courses are generally available in all geographies, delivered in English.

The new AWS Storage Gateway management console makes it easier for you to create, manage, and monitor resources such as file shares, tapes, and volumes. In addition to a refreshed look and feel, you can now connect your gateway with a simple activation key to help speed up deployment, and create new file shares using a streamlined process. You can easily configure your gateway to use Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) endpoints and leverage enhanced troubleshooting information for the endpoint configuration. Throughout the console, contextual information about your Storage Gateway resources is provided as part of the help panel, allowing you to easily find answers to common questions and browse related User guide content.

Starting today, AWS Gateway Load Balancer is available in the Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Asia Pacific (Osaka) regions. With this launch, AWS Gateway Load Balancer is now available in 21 regions.

Following the announcement of updates in MySQL database versions 5.6 , 5.7, and 8.0, we have updated Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL to support MySQL minor versions 5.6.51, 5.7.33, and 8.0.23. We recommend that customers upgrade to any of the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MySQL, and to benefit from the numerous bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MySQL community. Learn more about upgrading your database instances in the Amazon RDS User Guide, including automatic minor version upgrades.

Amazon Connect is now available in the Canada (Montreal) AWS Region, increasing the number of AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is available to nine. You can claim toll-free and local telephone numbers from Canadian telephony suppliers.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Transcribe Custom Language Models (CLM) now support Australian English, British English, Hindi and US Spanish. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. CLM allows you to use pre-existing data to build a custom speech engine for your specific batch transcription use cases. No prior machine learning experience is required to create your CLM.

You can now use the Amazon Redshift Query Editor with Amazon Redshift clusters in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. You can query data in your Amazon Redshift cluster directly from your AWS Management console, using the Query Editor. The Redshift Query Editor provides an easier way for admins and end-users to run SQL queries without having to install and setup an external JDBC/ODBC client. Query results are instantly visible within the console.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is now available in the EU (Milano) and Africa (Cape Town) AWS Regions. This regional expansion is particularly useful for organizations in Italy and South Africa where data residency considerations previously made it difficult for customers to use Amazon SES.

Announcing Amazon CloudWatch Metric Streams - a new feature that enables customers to create a continuous, near real-time stream of metrics to a destination of their choice.

Today, AWS announced the launch of Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall, a managed firewall that enables customers to block DNS queries made for known malicious domains and to allow queries for trusted domains. DNS Firewall provides more granular control over the DNS querying behavior of resources within your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs).  

AWS Direct Connect now offers IEEE 802.1AE MAC Security Standard (MACsec) encryption for 10Gbps and 100Gbps Dedicated Connections at select locations to secure your high-speed, private connectivity to the cloud.

Amazon CloudFront announces reduced billing granularity for Lambda@Edge function duration from 50ms down to 1ms. This will lower the price for most Lambda@Edge functions, more so for functions of short duration. Now, compute duration will be billed in 1ms increments per invocation instead of being rounded up to the nearest 50ms increment per invocation as before.

Lightweight functions such as header manipulations or URL rewrites tend to have a short duration. With this change, it will now be even more cost effective to run these functions on Lambda@Edge. For example, a function that runs in 10ms on average used to be billed for 50ms. Now, that function will be billed for 10ms resulting in a 80% reduction in duration spend. This change applies to all four Lambda@Edge event triggers - viewer request, viewer response, origin request and origin response. This change will be effective starting April 1, 2021. For more information, visit the CloudFront Pricing Page.

Starting today, the interactive EC2 Serial Console is now generally available. EC2 Serial Console provides a simple and secure way to troubleshoot boot and network connectivity issues by establishing a connection to the serial port of an instance. It provides a one-click, text-based access to an instances’ serial port as though a monitor and keyboard were attached to it. This access can be used for interactive troubleshooting.

You can now use the Amazon Redshift Data API in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions to access Amazon Redshift. The Redshift Data API simplifies data access, ingest, and egress from languages supported with AWS SDK such as Python, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and C++ so you can focus on building applications versus managing infrastructure.

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics, machine learning, and application development. Using AWS Glue Workflows, you can orchestrate and execute a complex multi-job, multi-crawler data-integration workflow. AWS Glue custom blueprints make it easy for data engineers to create repeatable AWS Glue workflows.

When creating datasets in AWS Glue DataBrew from the Amazon S3 data lake, you can now create dynamic datasets to schedule data preparation on new incoming Amazon S3 files or apply transformations on filtered or conditionally chosen files or folders in S3. You can create a dynamic S3 path to choose files based on a time-window or time of last file update, and defining custom parameters to replace string, number, or date-based values in your S3 file path with filter conditions such as begins with, ends with, contains, does not contain, less than, greater than, before, and others. Custom parameter names can be included as columns in your datasets and the revised schema will be used for jobs running on dynamic datasets. With parameterized S3 paths and/or files, users can schedule to apply existing recipes to run on selected dynamic datasets.

With AWS Glue DataBrew, you can now visually detect outliers in data from your data lake, data warehouses, and other JDBC-accessible data sources. You can further handle outliers by replacing, removing, rescaling, or flagging them using mathematical and algorithmic methods such as z-score (to find the difference from mean value and divide it by the standard deviation), modified z-score (to calculate the difference from median absolute deviation), interquartile ranges (to calculate values between the first quartile and the third quartile) and one or more transformations such as creating a flag column, applying window functions, or choose from over 250+ other transformations.  

AWS Config now supports the ability to capture and view the compliance history of AWS Config conformance packs. You can see how the overall compliance status of a conformance pack changed over time, and which rules within a conformance pack impacted the status change. You can aggregate conformance pack compliance data from multiple accounts and AWS Regions using AWS Config aggregators to get a centralized view of your compliance regimes and operational best practices. You can maintain up to 7 years of history. You can also run AWS Config advanced queries on this data for more details about your conformance pack compliance.

We are pleased to announce the launch of Building Data Lakes on AWS. Data lakes enable organizations to generate business value by identifying and acting upon opportunities for business growth. This new one-day classroom course will help you practice building a data lake in a hands-on environment.  An expert instructor will teach you how to build and secure a data lake using AWS Lake Formation while also showing you how to optimize for cost and performance.

AWS Data Exchange now enables providers to copy descriptions, data sets, and public offers from their existing products to a new product. With this launch, providers can select any existing product, published or unpublished, and copy all of its details to a new draft product, which they can then modify as needed and publish within a few seconds. For providers that frequently create new products that share similar metadata, this will save a significant amount of time and effort.

You can now configure each path segment of an API Gateway custom domain name to route requests to different APIs. Using multi-level base path mappings, you can implement path-based API versioning and migrate API traffic between APIs according to request paths with many segments.

AWS Site-to-Site VPN service today increased the default service quotas for the dynamic routes advertised to and from a Site-to-Site VPN connection on a Transit Gateway. You can now advertise up to 1,000 dynamic routes (an increase from 100) from a customer gateway device to a Site-to-Site VPN connection on a Transit Gateway. Similarly, you can now advertise up to 5,000 routes (an increase from 1,000) from a Site-to-Site VPN connection on a Transit Gateway to a customer gateway device. Advertised routes come from the route table that's associated with the VPN attachment.

Amazon EMR now supports Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) v2, in addition to v1, for all IMDS calls to EMR clusters. Instance metadata is data about your instance that you can use to configure or manage the running instance. IMDSv1 is fully secure and AWS will continue to support it. But IMDSv2 adds new “belt and suspenders” protections for four types of vulnerabilities that could be used to try to access the IMDS. For more information, please read the AWS Security blogpost.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of Queue notifications for Amazon GameLift. Trusted by some of the most successful game companies in the world like Wargaming, Ubisoft, and more, GameLift deploys, operates, and scales dedicated servers for multiplayer games. With this new update, you as a game developer can now receive automatic notifications when changes take place to the state of your player queues on GameLift.

AWS Transit Gateway Connect today increased the default service quotas for the dynamic routes advertised to and from a Transit Gateway Connect peer. You can now advertise up to 1,000 dynamic routes (an increase from 100) from a customer gateway appliance in an on-premises network or a virtual router appliance in a VPC to a Transit Gateway Connect peer. Similarly, you can now advertise up to 5,000 routes (an increase from 1,000) from a Transit Gateway Connect peer to a customer gateway appliance or a virtual router appliance. Advertised routes come from the route table that's associated with the AWS Transit Gateway Connect attachment.

On March 30 2021, Amazon Pinpoint announced the launch of new Journey controls to allow customers to customize their user experience, and when messages are sent. Journeys are multi-step campaigns that can be executed across SMS, email, and push messages. Journeys are intended for customers with user engagement use cases, and who need to be precise on when messages are delivered to their users.

AWS Global Accelerator now supports traffic through the new AWS edge location in Jakarta, Indonesia. Using Global Accelerator, users in Indonesia can now see improved performance of up to 20% for internet traffic to the AWS Singapore Region and up to 60% for traffic to AWS Regions in North America and Europe. Global Accelerator is now available through 96 Points of Presence globally and supports application endpoints in more than 20 AWS Regions.  

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot, which makes it easy to create highly accurate machine learning models, now provides a model explainability report generated by Amazon SageMaker Clarify, making it easier to understand and explain how the models you create with SageMaker Autopilot make predictions. Explainability reports include feature importance values so you can understand how each attribute in your training data contributes to the predicted result as a percentage. The higher the percentage, the more strongly that feature impacts your model’s predictions. You can download the explainability report as a human readable file, view model properties including feature importance in Amazon SageMaker Studio, or access feature importance using the SageMaker Autopilot APIs.

Today, we are happy to announce that Amazon Fraud Detector now supports batch fraud predictions. Amazon Fraud Detector is a fully managed service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent online activities, such as the creation of fake accounts or online payment fraud. Until today, Fraud Detector supported real-time fraud predictions via the GetEventPrediction API, which is ideal for low-latency synchronous fraud prediction use cases but requires customers to integrate an API and make an API call for every event they want to evaluate. Now, customers who have non real-time fraud prediction use cases can get fraud predictions for a large number of events in one go, or on an hourly or daily basis, using the new batch prediction feature without needing to write any code.  

AMI Factory is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Capgemini, an AWS Migration Competency Partner. AMI Factory helps customers integrate and build any type of AMIs with custom configurations, setting security standards for operating system (OS)-level benchmarks and vulnerability scans based on customer requirements within a few hours. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers identification of eligible AMIs, template creation, and deployment.

AWS Config advanced queries feature now supports pagination for queries that contain aggregate functions, such as COUNT and SUM. For example, getting the total number of resources in each AWS account requires the COUNT aggregate function. You can now use advanced queries to get complete results for your aggregate queries through pagination, which were previously limited to 500 rows. Pagination is a technique that is used to divide large results into “pages,” where each page contains a subset of results. You can process the first page of results, then the second page, and so on.

AWS Step Functions is now integrated with Amazon EMR on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), making it easier to integrate Apache Spark based jobs into your analytics pipeline. You can now build workflows including steps to manage EMR on EKS virtual clusters and submit jobs without writing code to manage the state of the job.

AWS Security Hub is now available in the new AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. You can now centrally view and manage the security posture of your AWS accounts in AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region.

AWS WAF now supports inserting HTTP headers to the user request when WAF allows the request to reach your application. You can use the Request Header Insertion feature to help validate that requests made to your application were evaluated by WAF and configure your application to only allow requests that contain the custom header values that you specify. You can also insert headers so your application can process the request differently based on the presence of the header, or simply log the header in your application logs for reporting and analytics.

AWS WAF now supports configuring the HTTP status code and the response body returned to the user when a request is blocked. Until today, AWS WAF could only return HTTP status code 403 (forbidden) when the user request was blocked by WAF. With Custom Response, you can now configure AWS WAF to send out a different HTTP status code, such as 3xx (redirects), 4xx (client errors), or 5xx (server errors). These codes can be used to redirect users to different parts of your application or provide users a specific response code based on the reason they were blocked by WAF. In addition, you can use Custom Response to include a response body to present a customized error message back to the user.

Pipeline Factory is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Mphasis Stelligent, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Pipeline Factory enables DevOps teams to define, build, and publish standardized pipelines that enforce quality, security, and governance throughout the software delivery lifecycle. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers discovery and design, Pipeline Factory implementation, and publication and deployment of standardized Pipeline Products.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. As a document database, Amazon DocumentDB makes it easy to store, query, and index JSON data at scale.

AWS Global Accelerator now supports traffic through the new AWS edge location in Jakarta, Indonesia. Using Global Accelerator, users in Indonesia can now see improved performance of up to 20% for internet traffic to the AWS Singapore Region and up to 60% for traffic to AWS Regions in North America and Europe. Global Accelerator is now available through 96 Points of Presence globally and supports application endpoints in more than 20 AWS Regions.  

Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is now available in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) region. Using Container Insights, DevOps and systems engineers can monitor, isolate, and diagnose containerized applications and microservices environments through automated dashboards. This helps you visualize the performance and health of Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate resources including clusters, tasks, containers, and services.  

Amazon Forecast adds support for AWS Resource Groups and AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor. Amazon Forecast uses machine learning (ML) to generate more accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience. Forecast brings the same technology used at Amazon.com to developers as a fully managed service, removing the need to manage resources or rebuild your systems.

We’re excited to announce the launch of AWS DevOps Monitoring Dashboard, a reference implementation that automates the setup of DevOps metrics dashboards so that customers developing on AWS can measure development activity and identify areas for continued improvement.

WorkSpaces Manager for Amazon WorkSpaces (WSM) is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Nuvens Consulting, an AWS Digital Workplace Competency Partner. WSM is ideal for customers looking to optimize, automate, and reduce the day-to-day management of their Amazon WorkSpaces estate. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers automation of the administration, integration into existing support mechanisms, and right-sizing the Amazon WorkSpaces estate to ensure cost efficiency.

Amazon SageMaker now supports adding authentication to requests for pulling images stored in your private Docker Registry to build containers for real-time inference. Amazon SageMaker makes it easy to deploy your trained models to production with a single click, so you can start generating real-time inferences with low latency. You can bring your own code for performing real-time inference using container images stored in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) or a private Docker registry of your choice. SageMaker can now authenticate with your private Docker registry so you can have an additional layer of security and the peace of mind that requests to your container images are serviced only for authorized entities.

Starting today, you are now offered additional file and folder sharing controls on your Amazon WorkDocs Android application. With this release, you can now share a folder as well as edit sharing permissions such as adding or removing members of the shared folder. You can also share a link as well as manage shared links for files and folders such as removing your shared link, adding a password to your shared link, or setting expiration dates for your shared link. In addition, you can now manage sharing permissions directly from the Folder List page for documents. These additional controls make it quicker than ever to share with colleagues and partners from your mobile application while also providing full control to manage the sharing workflow securely throughout the Android application.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports adding Amazon EC2 P4d instances as worker nodes to clusters in regions where P4d is available.

You can now use IAM condition keys as part of IAM and Service Control Policies (SCPs) to centrally govern endpoint, authorization, and logging configurations for your APIs in API Gateway.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), enabling applications to achieve the performance of an on-premises machine learning training cluster, with the scalability, flexibility, and elasticity provided by Kubernetes clusters managed by EKS.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports running clusters with high availability across multiple AWS Local Zones. AWS Local Zones are an extension of an AWS Region where you can run your latency-sensitive applications using AWS services in geographic proximity to end-users. Previously, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis only supported launching a cluster in a single AWS Local Zone.

AWS Security Hub is now integrated with Amazon Macie to automatically ingest sensitive data findings from Macie. Security Hub previously ingested policy findings from Macie, and this integration adds sensitive data findings. All of Security Hub’s findings are automatically normalized using the AWS Security Finding Format (ASFF), enabling you to more easily search, correlate, and operationalize them. To get started, visit the Settings page in the Macie console and select Security Hub as a publish destination for sensitive data findings. You can also learn more about how to discover sensitive data in the Macie documentation.

AWS Backup, a cost-effective, fully managed, policy-based service that further simplifies data protection at scale, is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. With AWS Backup, you can centralize and automate data protection across AWS services and accounts, to support your regulatory compliance obligations and meet your business continuity goals.

Today Amazon Lookout for Metrics is generally available to all AWS customers. Lookout for Metrics is a machine learning (ML) service that detects anomalies or unexpected changes in your metrics, helping you proactively monitor the health of your business, diagnose issues and find opportunities quickly – with no ML experience required.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of all Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voices in the Canada (Central) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) Regions. You can now synthesize all NTTS voices in this Region, including the Newscaster and Conversational speaking styles. In addition, you can continue to synthesize over 60 standard voices available in 29 languages in the Amazon Polly portfolio.

AWS License Manager automated discovery now allows customers to exclude instances that do not need license payment per a customer’s licensing agreements. AWS License Manager automatically tracks instances across AWS and on-premises environments based on customer defined rules. While configuring automated discovery, administrators can now define exclusion rules using custom defined tags or AWS Account IDs to identify instances that should not count towards license usage. It helps automated discovery exclude instances that matches these rules and thus further simplifies the management of software licenses.

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink now supports streaming applications built using Python version 3.7. This enables you to write streaming applications in the Python language and run them using Apache Flink v1.11 on Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics. Apache Flink v1.11 offers support for Python through the Table API, which is a unified, relational API for data processing.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) One Zone is now available in the Asia (Osaka) Region, reducing storage costs by 47% compared to Amazon EFS Standard storage classes, while maintaining the Amazon EFS capabilities that customers love.

AWS IoT Core now enables customers to customize the behavior of their data endpoints, making it simpler to onboard IoT applications with existing devices in the field. Customers can now configure their data endpoints with custom domain names and associated server certificates stored in AWS Certificate Manager. They can also attach custom authorizers, and create multiple data endpoints for their account.

Today, Amazon Kendra, an intelligent search service powered by machine learning is releasing new search connectors from Perficient, an AWS partner. These are now available in the Amazon Kendra Connector Library and include search connectors for IBM Case Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, Atlassian Jira and Confluence, and many others.

We are excited to announce the launch of the updated Advanced Architecting on AWS course. This instructor-led training course is designed for cloud architects who want to extend their baseline knowledge of AWS services. An expert AWS instructor will help you learn advanced architecting topics such as hybrid connectivity and hybrid AWS devices, networking with a focus on AWS Transit Gateway connectivity, AWS Container services, automation tools for CI/CD, security options, and much more.

The AWS Snowcone service is now available for order for customers in the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. With this launch, Snowcone is now available for order in Asia Pacific (Sydney), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon) Regions. AWS Snowcone is the smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing, edge storage, and data transfer devices. Snowcone is portable, rugged, and secure – small and light enough to fit in a backpack, and able to withstand harsh environments. Customers use Snowcone to deploy applications at the edge, and to collect data, process it locally, and move it to AWS either offline (by shipping the device to AWS) or online (by using AWS DataSync on Snowcone to send the data to AWS over the network).

We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.0 of the NICE DCV web client software development kit (SDK). NICE DCV is a high performance remote display protocol that helps users to securely access remote desktop or application sessions, including 3D graphics applications hosted on servers with high-performance GPUs. This JavaScript SDK is an optional component that enables developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to integrate a customized NICE DCV web client into their web applications. Customers can build custom DCV web clients using custom user interface components and the core DCV streaming features provided by this SDK, delivering unique experiences tailored to their own use cases.

Containers have proven popular with AWS and Red Hat customers because they increase developer velocity, improve application portability, and enable faster application development. Currently, AWS offers a broad range of containers technology in the cloud, including Amazon Elastic Containers Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS with AWS Fargate. Now customers have an additional option with the launch of Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), which provides a new managed service that makes it easier for Red Hat OpenShift customers to build, scale, and manage containerized applications on AWS.

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that helps customers to securely transfer data between AWS services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in just a few clicks, now supports Zendesk as a destination.

AWS Elemental MediaTailor now supports Enhanced Debug Logs that provide valuable information to troubleshoot playback session issues. When debug log mode is enabled, MediaTailor records all manifest requests and response payloads to the CloudWatch Logs for expanded diagnostics information. Learn more in our blog.

With this new release of the AWS Toolkit for VS Code, customers can use federated credentials, MFA and AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) to connect Visual Studio Code to AWS. Using AWS SSO, users can sign in to their organization’s Active Directory, a built-in AWS SSO directory, or another external identity provider (IdP) connected to AWS SSO. Regardless of which IdP you use, AWS SSO abstracts those distinctions away, and they all work with the AWS Toolkit, as explained in this short blog post.

AWS Backup adds support for bulk deletion of recovery points from backup vaults in the AWS Backup console. You can now select multiple recovery points for deletion at one time.  

You can now access Amazon Timestream APIs from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using VPC endpoints. Amazon VPC endpoints are easy to configure and provide reliable connectivity to Amazon Timestream APIs without requiring an internet gateway or a Network Address Translation (NAT) instance.

AWS CloudTrail now supports logging of data events for Amazon DynamoDB. With this new feature, you can now use CloudTrail to log item-level DynamoDB activity from all your DynamoDB tables or specific tables with read-only and write-only filters. You can also use CloudTrail advanced event selectors for more granular control of which data events you want to log from DynamoDB. All DynamoDB data events are delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket and Amazon CloudWatch Events, which creates an audit log of data access and allows you to respond to events recorded by CloudTrail. Details on when and who made DynamoDB API calls enhances data visibility for security and operations engineering teams. For example, you can quickly determine which DynamoDB items were created, read, updated or deleted and identify the source of the API calls. If you detect unauthorized DynamoDB activity, you can also take immediate action to restrict access.

You can now manage non-IP based cloud resources in AWS Cloud Map’s public and private DNS namespaces. AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service. Using AWS Cloud Map, you can define custom names for your application resources, such as Amazon ECS tasks, Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon DynamoDB tables, or any other cloud resource. Your application can then discover the location and metadata of cloud resources associated with these custom names via AWS SDK or by making authenticated API calls.

We are excited to announce that you can now enable notifications for workflow status changes while using Amazon Forecast, allowing you to work seamlessly without the disruption of having to check if a particular workflow has completed. Additionally, you can now automate workflows through the notifications to increase work efficiency. Amazon Forecast uses machine learning (ML) to generate more accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon Forecast brings the same technology used at Amazon.com to developers as a fully managed service, removing the need to manage resources or rebuild your systems.

Amazon Detective is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. You can now easily analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities in both AWS GovCloud (US-West) and AWS GovCloud (US-East).  

Today, we are announcing the general availability of ML Detect, a new feature of AWS IoT Device Defender that automatically detects device-level operational and security anomalies across your IoT fleet by learning from your past data. Now, in addition to being able to manually set static alarms with AWS IoT Device Defender Rules Detect, you can use machine learning to automatically learn your fleet's expected behaviors so that you don’t need an in-depth understanding of how your devices act across a range of metrics to get started.  

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports automated memory management of Elasticsearch clusters with the new Auto-Tune feature. Auto-Tune is an adaptive resource management system that automatically adjusts Elasticsearch internal settings to handle dynamic workloads, optimizing cluster resources to improve efficiency and performance. With Auto-Tune, you can achieve performance boost in ingestion throughput for log analytics workloads, and reduced tail latencies for search queries.  

Now you can use AWS CloudTrail to log data-plane API activity to monitor, alarm, and archive item-level activity in your Amazon DynamoDB tables. You can use this information about item-level activity as part of an audit, to help address compliance requirements, and monitor which AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, roles, and permissions are being used to access your table data. 

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MariaDB now supports AWS Graviton2-based database instances in the additional regions of US West (N. California), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), and Europe (London). Graviton2 instances provide up to 35% performance improvement and up to 52% price/performance improvement over comparable current generation x86-based instances for RDS open source databases depending on database engine, version, and workload.

Today we are delighted to announce the availability of AWS Media Intelligence (MI) solutions, a combination of services that empower customers to easily integrate AI into their media content workflows. AWS MI allows customers to analyze their media, improve content engagement rates, reduce production costs, and increase the lifetime value of media content. With AWS MI, customers can choose turnkey solutions from participating AWS Partners or leverage AWS Solutions to avoid starting from scratch.

The Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver now supports dynamic provisioning of Kubernetes persistent volumes. Kubernetes applications requiring access to a shared file system on AWS can now have storage provisioned on demand, eliminating the need for cluster administrators to pre-provision volumes.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M5n, M5dn, R5n, R5dn instances are available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. Based on the AWS Nitro System, these instances make 100 Gbps networking available to network-bound workloads, and Amazon Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for low latency networking HPC/ML workloads. Customers can take advantage of this improved network performance to run a variety of network-bound workloads such as High Performance Computing (HPC), analytics, machine learning, Big Data, and data lake applications, as well as accelerate data transfer to and from Amazon S3, reducing the data ingestion time for applications and speeding up delivery of results. Workloads on these instances will continue to take advantage of the security, scalability and reliability of Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). These instances also support

Amazon Redshift Spectrum is now available in four additional AWS Regions: Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Europe (Milan), and AWS GovCloud (US-East).

Today we are announcing new Hugging Face integrations with Amazon SageMaker to help data scientists develop, train, and tune state-of-the-art natural language (NLP) models more quickly and easily.

Starting today, you can use inherited and default values with AWS Cost Categories. AWS Cost Categories enables you to define rules to categorize your costs using dimensions such as accounts, tags, services, charge types, and even other Cost Categories. With the new features, you can achieve more efficient and holistic categorization of your cost and usage information.

Amazon QuickSight launches customized tooltips, which enable dashboard readers to get additional insights from visuals. Custom tooltips provide additional context to any visuals with more dimensions and metrics added beyond those already available on the visual. Dashboard authors can configure these tooltips, sort the display order, and customize field names within the tooltip. To learn more about tooltips, see here.

AWS Glue Studio now provides the option to define transforms using SQL queries, allowing you to perform aggregations, easily apply filter logic to your data, add calculated fields, and more. This feature makes it easy to seamlessly mix SQL queries with AWS Glue Studio’s visual transforms while authoring ETL jobs.

Amazon EC2 is now available through VPC endpoints in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) region, allowing you to access Amazon EC2 from within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without traversing the internet.

AWS has expanded the availability of Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances to Europe (Milan), Europe (Stockholm), and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Inf1 instances are powered by AWS Inferentia chips, which AWS custom-designed to provide high performance and lowest cost machine learning inference in the cloud.  

Amazon CloudFront announces its first edge location in Jakarta, Indonesia. Viewers served by this new edge location can expect up to a 30% improvement in first-byte latency. Traffic delivered from this edge location is included within CloudFront's Asia Pacific region pricing. For more information about CloudFront’s global infrastructure, see Amazon CloudFront Infrastructure.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for Db2 LUW version 11.5 as a source. Using AWS DMS, you can now perform live migrations from Db2 LUW version 11.5 databases to any AWS DMS supported targets.

Today, AWS Marketplace announced that sellers can now manage versions and update product information for AMI and Container products through the AWS Marketplace Catalog API. This launch builds upon a prior release for self-service listing updates through the AWS Marketplace Management Portal. Now, sellers can use the Catalog API to automate their workflows for making new versions available to customers.

Customers using the AWS IoT Core Apache Kafka action to connect their IoT applications to Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) clusters can now use usernames and passwords to authenticate their rules. The Apache Kafka action for AWS IoT Core evaluates inbound messages and delivers them to your Amazon MSK or self managed Apache Kafka cluster.

AWS Client VPN has expanded the number of Availability Zones supported inside the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Canada (Central) regions. This expansion gives you more zones to choose from and additional flexibility when associating subnets. This change also increases the number of concurrent connections you can make per endpoint in these Regions.

AWS Audit Manager now supports the CIS Benchmark for CIS Amazon Web Services Foundations Benchmark v1.3.0, Level 1 and 2 as a new prebuilt standard framework. This framework adds to the existing prebuilt frameworks provided in Audit Manager. With this release, you can launch an assessment from this framework with just a few clicks. Audit Manager will map your AWS resources to the requirements in the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark and start gathering evidence automatically to help you scale your audit capability in the cloud as your business grows.

Amazon EC2 now supports Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot when migrating virtual machines from on-premise to EC2 without having to convert them to Legacy BIOS. UEFI is a modern firmware that initializes your operating system.

AWS Solutions has updated Discovering Hot Topics using Machine Learning, an AWS Solutions Implementation that ingests text, image and video (video: upcoming feature) from online discourse in order to perform topic modeling, sentiment analysis on plain text and text embedded within images as well as detection of unsafe content in images. In this updated version, the solution allows customers to use geographical coordinates as parameters to filter ingested Twitter data and to narrow visual results. With this capability, organizations can now analyze tweets originating from geographic locations that are relevant to their business and use case.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports the January 2021 Patch Set Update (PSU) for Oracle Database 12.1. January 2021 Release Update (RU) for Oracle Database 12.2, 18c, and 19c have already been launched.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) has reduced control plane creation time by 40%, enabling you to create a new EKS cluster control plane in 9 minutes or less, on average.

AWS Proton introduces delete validations for templates in-use, ensuring that dependent resources are not orphaned if a template version is inadvertently deleted.

AWS Fargate platform version 1.4.0 is now the LATEST version. All new Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Tasks or ECS Services that use the Fargate launch type and have the platformVersion parameter set to LATEST or not specified will run on platform version 1.4.0. The new version has features such as Amazon Elastic File System support and Amazon ECS Exec.  

Starting today, AWS Gateway Load Balancer is available in the following 9 regions:

1. US West (N. California)
2. EU (London)
3. EU (Paris)
4. EU (Milano)
5. Africa (Cape Town)
6. Middle East (Baharain)
7. Asia Pacific (Hong Kong)
8. Asia Pacific (Singapore)
9. Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
   

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL now offers rollback protection for major version upgrades.

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) launches increased performance and latency reduction for control plane verification APIs. With this improvement, QLDB customers will experience an average latency reduction of up to 70% and the ability to scale at least 10 times from the current call volumes in many scenarios.

The Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Instance Refresh feature enables customers to update the EC2 instances in their Auto Scaling groups on a rolling basis. Now, Instance Refresh gives customers more control over the update process by letting them configure Instance Refresh checkpoints to phase their deployments. An Instance Refresh checkpoint specifies what percent of the Auto Scaling group’s instances should be replaced and how long to wait before continuing with the rolling update. This gives customers time to perform any necessary validation or testing steps at various checkpoints.

With S3 Object Lambda you can add your own code to S3 GET requests to modify and process data as it is returned to an application. For the first time, you can use custom code to modify the data returned by standard S3 GET requests to filter rows, dynamically resize images, redact confidential data, and much more.

Starting today, AWS Launch Wizard deployments support the ‘No Rollback on Failure’ feature for all Launch Wizard applications. Now, when a Launch Wizard deployment fails, resources that were created as part of the deployment will not be immediately deleted/rolled back.

AWS Training and Certification launched a new course entitled AWS Cloud Technical Essentials. Available for free on Coursera and edX, this course uses video lectures and demonstrations to teach the technical fundamentals of AWS. Upon course completion, learners will be able to make an informed decision about when and how to apply core AWS services for compute, storage, and database to different use cases.

Amazon Comprehend now supports identification of text documents that contain personally identifiable information (PII). You can use Amazon Comprehend’s Contains PII API synchronously to discover documents that contain PII, to set up alarms and control access on documents with sensitive information. Amazon Comprehend’s machine learning models find documents that contain PII information such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, and email addresses and allow you to target the PII of your choice.

Today, AWS X-Ray launches Insights in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. X-Ray Insights helps customers proactively discover issues in applications by using anomaly detection. it also enables developers and DevOps engineers to detect anomalies in fault rate for an application and then notify their teams on these issues and why it occurred.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of an update to Amazon GameLift, which increases global coverage for developers, while providing seamless, low-latency gameplay experiences for players worldwide. Trusted by some of the most successful game companies in the world like Gungho and Ubisoft, GameLift deploys, operates, and scales dedicated servers for multiplayer games. With this update, you as a game developer can now tap into six new regions (from 15 to 21), while also getting up and running faster from simpler fleet management.  

Amazon Connect analytics users can now define queue service levels to measure the percentage of customer contacts answered by an agent between 1 second and 7 days for both real-time and historical metrics.  

The new AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) app, found in the Azure Active Directory app gallery, makes it easier to use your Azure AD identities for sign-in across multiple AWS accounts and AWS SSO integrated applications. Customers who want a centralized way to manage Azure AD users and groups across AWS can use the app to connect Azure AD to AWS SSO once. Customers can then manage permissions to AWS centrally in AWS SSO, and enable users to sign in using Azure AD to access assigned AWS accounts and applications, such as Amazon SageMaker Studio Notebooks.

Starting today, you can use AWS Elemental MediaConnect to transport live video using the Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) protocol. With the addition of SRT, you have more flexibility and compatibility for creating highly reliable, low-latency live video transport workflows.

AWS introduces the Developer Preview of its opinionated deployment tool for .NET cloud-native applications. Using this tool, developers can now deploy their .NET applications in just a few easy steps from the .NET CLI.  

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer makes it easier to implement least privilege permissions by analyzing resource policies to provide provable security and help you identify unintended public or cross-account access. A recent update allows you to validate public and cross-account access before deploying permissions changes. Now, we are extending policy validation in IAM Access Analyzer by adding over 100 policy checks with actionable recommendations. These checks use static analysis to help you proactively validate your permission policies during policy authoring to set secure and functional permissions. The checks include functional validation like developers might expect from a linter, and go beyond that to evaluate best practices in granting access. These checks analyze your policy and report security warnings, errors, general warnings, and suggestions based on their impact. They provide actionable recommendations that guide you to set secure and functional permissions. For example, IAM Access Analyzer reports a security warning when your policy grants access to pass any role to any service, which is overly permissive. The security warning includes a recommendation that you scope down the permissions to pass specific role(s) instead.

Amazon RDS Proxy now lets you create additional endpoints each with their own VPC settings, enabling access to your Aurora or RDS databases from applications in a different VPC.

Amazon RDS Proxy now lets you create an additional read-only endpoint to connect your application to Amazon Aurora Replicas. In some cases, RDS Proxy helps improve application scalability, resiliency, and security. These benefits can extend to your Aurora Replicas when connected through the RDS Proxy. To learn about Aurora Replicas, see our documentation.

Deploy Containers on AWS is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from NTT DATA Services, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Deploy Containers on AWS delivers a ready-to-deploy secure foundation that expedites the deployment of both greenfield container-based applications and already-containerized applications. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a current state assessment, deployment of the solution, and a solution walk-through.

Build Cloud Foundations is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from NTT DATA Services, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Build Cloud Foundations provides a secure, scalable cloud foundation to accelerate your cloud adoption journey. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a multiple-account security strategy that accelerates cloud adoption with training, documentation, and resources to help teams get the skills they need.

AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service that makes it easy to collect, store, organize and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale to help you make better, data-driven decisions.

We’re excited to announce a free digital course: Amazon Simple Storage Service Cost Optimization. This advanced 60-minute course explores techniques and tools you can use to optimize your Amazon S3 costs. Designed for cloud architects, storage architects, developers, and operations engineers, it includes interactive lessons and video demonstrations. 

Amazon SageMaker now supports deploying multiple containers on real-time endpoints for low latency inferences and invoking them independently for each request. This new capability enables you to run up to five different machine learning (ML) models and frameworks on a single endpoint and save up to 80% in costs. This option is ideal when you have multiple ML models with similar resource needs and when individual models don't have sufficient traffic to utilize the full capacity of the endpoint instances. For example, if you have a set of ML models that are invoked infrequently or at different times, or if you have dev/test endpoints.

Today, AWS Copilot launched version 1.4 which now provides more operational capabilities for applications hosted on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). This allows you to directly access a container to troubleshoot and run commands with ECS exec. AWS Copilot also added the ability to deploy applications from a Bitbucket repository and attach Amazon Elastic File Service (EFS) volumes.

Amazon Corretto 16 is now generally available. This version supports the latest Java feature release JDK 16 and is available on Linux, Windows, and macOS. You can download Corretto 16 from our GitHub Releases.

AWS Fault Injection Simulator is a fully managed service for running fault injection experiments on AWS that makes it easier to continuously improve an application’s performance, observability, and resiliency.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) One Zone is now available in 5 additional regions, reducing storage costs by 47% compared to Amazon EFS Standard storage classes, while maintaining the Amazon EFS capabilities that customers love.  

Starting today, the next generation of memory optimized Amazon EC2 X2gd instances are available. These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System and are powered by AWS-designed, Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors. They deliver up to 55% better price performance compared to current generation x86-based X1 instances and provide high memory per vCPU at the lowest cost per GiB of memory in Amazon EC2. The higher performance and additional memory of X2gd instances enable customers to run memory-intensive workloads such as in-memory databases (Redis, Memcached), relational databases (MySQL, PostGreSQL), electronic design automation (EDA) workloads, real-time analytics, and real-time caching servers. Customers running containerized workloads can also use X2gd instances to optimize their infrastructure by consolidating more containers on a single instance. X2gd instances also feature local NVMe-based SSD storage for applications that need high speed, low latency access to data.

Today, AWS Batch is available in the Africa (Cape Town) and the Asia-Pacific (Osaka) Regions.  

Accelerate is a new operations plan from AWS Managed Services (AMS) that offers operations support for customers with existing workloads, with new planned workloads, or migrating to AWS. AMS Accelerate provides operational services such as monitoring, incident management, security, patch, and backup to help you with day-to-day operations management so that your teams can focus on business transformation in the cloud.

Amazon S3 is reducing the cost to move data to Amazon S3 Glacier by lowering PUT and Lifecycle request charges by 40% for all AWS Regions. You can use the S3 PUT API to directly store compliance and backup data in S3 Glacier that does not require immediate access. You can also use S3 Lifecycle policies to move data from S3 Standard, S3 Standard-Infrequent Access, or S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access to S3 Glacier to save on storage costs when data becomes rarely accessed.

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection now supports provisioning cost monitors and alert subscriptions via AWS CloudFormation templates. You can now set up Cost Anomaly Detection via JSON or YAML commands, enabling quick, consistent, and scalable configurations across AWS accounts.

Amazon WorkSpaces bundle management APIs are now available for customers to perform WorkSpaces bundle operations via command-line interface (CLI). The new set of APIs supports creation, deletion, and image association operations for WorkSpaces bundles. These APIs are intended for use by WorkSpaces administrators who want to automate WorkSpaces management workflows.

AWS Glue DataBrew, a visual data preparation tool that makes it easy for data analysts and data scientists to clean and normalize data for analytics and machine learning, is now available in the following three additional AWS Regions:

• Asia Pacific (Seoul)
• North America (Montreal)
• South America (Sao Paulo)

AWS Config now supports three new AWS Config managed rules to help you verify that your secrets in AWS Secrets Manager are configured in accordance with your organization’s security and compliance requirements. AWS Config records and evaluates configurations of your AWS resources. AWS Config managed rules are predefined rules that AWS Config uses to evaluate whether your AWS resource configurations comply with common best practices. AWS Secrets Manager helps easily rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets through their lifecycle.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) introduces Amazon ECS Exec - a simple, secure, and auditable way for customers to run commands in a container running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances or AWS Fargate. ECS Exec gives you interactive shell or single command access to a running container making it easier to debug issues, diagnose errors, collect one-off dumps and statistics, and interact with processes in the container.

Amazon GuardDuty has incorporated new machine learning techniques that have proven highly effective at discerning potentially malicious user activity from anomalous, but benign operational behavior within AWS accounts. This new capability continuously models API invocations within an account, incorporating probabilistic predictions to more accurately isolate and alert on highly suspicious user behavior. This new approach has proven to identify malicious activity associated with known attack tactics, including discovery, initial access, persistence, privilege escalation, defense evasion, credential access, impact, and data exfiltration. The new threat detections are available for all existing Amazon GuardDuty customers with no action required and at no additional costs.

ISO Eligible AWS Services deployed in AWS Wavelength are now in compliance with ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27017, and ISO/IEC 27018 standards. AWS maintains certifications through extensive audits of its controls to ensure that information security risks that affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of company and customer information are appropriately managed.

Virtual Desktop Accelerator is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from RedNight Consulting, an AWS Digital Workplace Competency Partner. Virtual Desktop Accelerator will accelerate your Amazon WorkSpaces deployment and empower you to manage and scale your virtual environment. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a walkthrough of the critical design elements, help making decisions on features and functions to use, and deployment of Amazon WorkSpaces for your organization.

Conversational AI Platform is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Accenture, an AWS Machine Learning Competency Partner. Conversational AI Platform helps organizations manage a conversational AI solution's end-to-end lifecycle. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers discovery and planning, proof of value, a solution pilot, and ongoing scaling and management.

AWS Graviton2-based database instances are now generally available for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Compatible Edition and Amazon Aurora MySQL Compatible Edition. Graviton2 instances provide up to 20% performance improvement and up to 35% price/performance improvement for Aurora depending on database size. You can also mix and match Graviton2 R6g and Intel R5 instances within the same cluster for your primary instance or for your read replica, enabling you to maximize price/performance improvements based on workload requirements. Graviton2 instances are already generally available for Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, and Amazon RDS for MariaDB.

The scheduled scaling feature of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling allows you to set a schedule for your Auto Scaling group to scale in and scale out your EC2 capacity. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now allows you to set a local time zone for scheduled scaling actions via the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and AWS SDKs, with support in the AWS Management Console and AWS CloudFormation coming soon. Selecting a time zone makes schedules easier to review and also removes the need to adjust schedules for Daylight Saving Time (DST).

Design and Implementation for Druva Data Protection Solutions is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Softcat, an AWS Storage Competency Partner. With the Design and Implementation for Druva Data Protection Solutions consulting offer, Softcat can design and deploy a fully executed backup solution for your organization. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that includes performing the total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis, planning the implementation, procuring the software, and delivering the project.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now publishes events to Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon EventBridge to provide better visibility into the service. Events to indicate the availability of a service software update for a domain, the start of an update, and the completion of an update will be included in the initial release. You will also be able to view these events under the new ‘Notifications’ view in the Amazon Elasticsearch Service console.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Oracle Management Agent (OMA) version 13.4 for Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) Cloud Control 13c Release 4 Update 9. OEM 13c offers web-based tools to monitor and manage your Oracle databases. Amazon RDS for Oracle installs OMA, which then communicates with your Oracle Management Service (OMS) to provide monitoring information. Customers running OMS 13.4 can now manage databases by installing OMA 13.4.

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capabilities to their voice-enabled applications. Up until now, Amazon Transcribe has offered confidence scores for each word in its transcription output for its batch (asynchronous) API. Starting today, Amazon Transcribe will surface word-level confidence scores for its streaming (synchronous) transcription API as well.

Today we are excited to announce Channel Assembly with AWS Elemental MediaTailor. With Channel Assembly, you can create linear channels that are delivered over-the-top (OTT) in a cost-efficient way, even for channels with low viewership. Virtual live streams are created with a low running cost by using existing multi-bitrate encoded and packaged VOD content. You can also easily monetize Channel Assembly linear streams by inserting ad breaks in your programs without having to condition the content with SCTE-35 markers.

Amazon Redshift Data Sharing, a secure and easy way to share live data across Redshift clusters, is now generally available. Data Sharing enables instant, granular, and high-performance data access across Amazon Redshift clusters within an AWS account, without the need to copy or move data. Data Sharing provides live access to the data so that your users always see most up-to-date and consistent information as it is updated in the data warehouse. Data Sharing can be used on your Amazon Redshift RA3 clusters at no additional cost.

Amazon Redshift Cross-database queries provide ability to query across databases in a Redshift cluster. This feature is now generally available in all regions where Amazon Redshift RA3 node types are available. With Cross-database queries, you can seamlessly query data from any database in the cluster, regardless of which database you are connected to. Cross-database queries can eliminate data copies and simplify your data organization to support multiple business groups on the same cluster. Cross-database queries can be used on your RA3 clusters at no additional cost.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer now enables you to validate access before deploying permissions changes. IAM Access Analyzer uses comprehensive policy analysis to provide provable security and generate findings for resource access. Now with IAM Access Analyzer, you can prevent public and cross-account access before you set permissions. You can preview findings and validate that your policy changes grant only intended access to your resources. By previewing findings, you can prevent unintended access before you deploy permissions.

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams (KVS) updates the service quota model for its media playback APIs to throttle based on the number of fragments requested rather than the number of playback sessions. This gives developers the flexibility to enable up to 10x more simultaneous playback sessions for applications that use Kinesis Video Streams for live or on-demand playback.

AWS Backup adds support for continuous backups and point-in-time recovery (PITR) of Amazon Relational Database (Amazon RDS) instances. You can now streamline your backup planning, management, and access control to Amazon RDS continuous backups in addition to the existing support of scheduled Amazon RDS snapshots.

Amazon Forecast uses machine learning (ML) to generate more accurate demand forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience. Forecast brings the same technology used at Amazon.com to developers as a fully managed service, removing the need to manage resources or rebuild your systems.

CloudEndure Migration and CloudEndure Disaster Recovery, services offered by AWS, now allow you to migrate, replicate, and recover applications from any source directly into AWS Outposts or between AWS Outposts devices, leading to lower latencies, better performance, and reduced costs. Previously, replicated data had to be transferred to and stored in a public AWS Region before being copied into EBS volumes on the AWS Outposts device. This caused increased cutover and recovery times, as well as data residency issues.

Customers can now enable multiple authentications protocols at the same time for an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition cluster. Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility supports both Kerberos authentication with Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and IAM database authentication, but in the past you could choose only one for a given cluster. Now, Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility supports enabling Kerberos and IAM authentication for a cluster simultaneously. For example, customers can enable IAM for authenticating AWS Lambda and enable Kerberos for other authentication situations.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now supports single Availability Zone (AZ) storage classes (One Zone), reducing storage costs by 47% compared to Amazon EFS Standard storage classes, while maintaining the EFS capabilities that customers love. With this launch, you can achieve an effective storage price of $0.043/GB-month.[1]

An Amazon Aurora Global Database is a single database that spans multiple AWS Regions, enabling disaster recovery from region-wide outages and low latency global reads. With today’s launch, the feature is available in the AWS Americas (São Paulo) and AWS Europe (Stockholm) Regions.  

When you generate data quality profiles on your datasets, DataBrew now publishes a visual dashboard on the AWS Glue DataBrew console with 40+ statistics and visualizations listed in a tabular format for easy comparison. Understanding data quality is key to the success of your analytics and machine learning projects. With this new capability in DataBrew, it’s easy to spot anomalies in data distributions, detect outliers, understand skews, and more for datasets varying from a few thousand rows to tens of millions of rows and varying file formats.  

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now supports single Availability Zone (AZ) storage classes (One Zone), reducing storage costs by 47% compared to Amazon EFS Standard storage classes, while maintaining the EFS capabilities that customers love. With this launch, you can achieve an effective storage price of $0.043/GB-month.[1]

AWS Graviton2-based database instances for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL are now supported in: US West (N. California), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), and Europe (London). Graviton2 instances provide up to 35% performance improvement and up to 52% price/performance improvement over comparable current generation x86-based instances for RDS open source databases depending on database engine, version, and workload. You can launch these database instances when using Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.

Amazon WorkSpaces is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region, increasing the number of AWS Regions in which WorkSpaces is available to 14. This expansion into a new AWS Region allows you to provision WorkSpaces closer to your users and data, providing a more responsive experience. Additionally, you can better meet data sovereignty requirements without the cost and complexity of building on-premises Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). For companies that provide services such as customer support, development, or back office services like accounting or IT support, using Amazon WorkSpaces in Asia Pacific (Mumbai) can enable a more reliable way of giving users a persistent desktop while helping you to reduce the risk of data leakage, with the closest possible AWS Region.

AWS Security Hub has released 25 new controls for its Foundational Security Best Practice standard. These controls conduct fully automatic checks against security best practices for Amazon API Gateway (APIGateway.1), Amazon Cloudfront (CloudFront.1-4), Amazon DynamoDB (DynamoDB.1-3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2.9-10), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS.2), Amazon Elasticsearch Service (ES.2-3), Amazon RDS (RDS.9-10), Amazon Redshift (RedShift.1-3,6), Amazon Simple Notification System (SNS.1), AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB.3-6), and AWS Key Management Service (KMS.3). If you enabled the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices standard in an account and configured Security Hub to automatically enable new controls, the above new controls are enabled by default. Security Hub now supports 115 security controls to automatically check your security posture in AWS.

Today, we are announcing first-class support for Kotlin in Amplify Android. Amplify Android is part of AWS Amplify, a set of libraries, tools, and services that help frontend web and mobile developers build secure, scalable, full-stack applications. Kotlin is a popular programming language commonly used by Android developers, among others.

AWS Lambda now supports four new Trusted Advisor checks to help customers optimize the cost, security, function runtime version and fault tolerance of their Lambda functions.  

Starting today Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports Cross-Region Automated Backups. This feature extends the existing Amazon RDS backup functionality, giving you the ability to setup automatic replication of system snapshots and transaction logs from a primary AWS Region to a secondary AWS Region.  

You can now use AWS CloudFormation templates to create and manage Amazon S3 on Outposts resources, allowing you to create buckets, endpoints and access points. Amazon S3 on Outposts delivers object storage to your on-premises AWS Outposts environment to meet local data processing and data residency needs. Using Amazon S3 APIs and features, Amazon S3 on Outposts makes it easy to store and manage data on your Outpost.

AWS Proton now allows you to define services that do not include pipelines, giving developer and platform teams flexibility in defining, provisioning, and deploying their services.  

Amazon EMR now supports instance fleets: a new way to provision clusters in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Instead of specifying an Amazon EC2 availability zone for your Amazon EMR cluster and an Amazon EC2 instance type for an Amazon EMR instance group, you can now provide a list of availability zones and instances, and Amazon EMR will automatically select an optimal combination based on cost and availability.

The over-the-air update (OTA), AWS IoT Device Defender custom metrics, and AWS IoT Device Shadow named shadow features are now generally available in AWS IoT Device SDK for Embedded C (C-SDK) version 202103.00. With this release, developers can use the C-SDK libraries to update firmware, manage device fleets, monitor fleet metrics, and create multiple shadows for their IoT device.

AWS Glue DataBrew adds four new visual transformations - Binning, Skewness, Binarization, and Transpose helping data analysts and data scientists leverage these transformations without writing any code.

Amazon Connect Chat now provides an out-of-the-box chat widget, making it easy to begin servicing your customers through chat in just a few clicks. The widget allows you to design the customer experience to align with your corporate branding by customizing the font and color scheme in the user interface. Once configured, the widget can be easily embedded for display on a website by copying and pasting a simple code snippet. The widget also provides advanced configuration options to restrict access to authenticated users or to define specific domains where the widget can be displayed.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 D3 instances, the latest generation of the dense HDD-storage instances, are available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo) and Europe (Frankfurt) regions.

AWS Shield Advanced now supports tagging of protected resources and protection groups. You can use tagging to restrict the ability to create or modify protections to sensitive resources via IAM policies, or to organize and track your AWS Shield Advanced costs at the tag level. Resource tagging allows you to define custom names for protected application resources, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator and Amazon Route 53.  

AWS Proton has made two new fields, service_instance and service_instance_name, available as inputs for the Jinja parametrization of templates. Template writers can use these fields to name individual resources in the template without requiring additional inputs from developers.  

AWS Elemental MediaLive now offers a Workflow Wizard to help you create a live streaming workflow in just a few minutes. The Workflow Wizard guides you through setting up a live streaming workflow using AWS Elemental MediaLive and other AWS services including AWS Elemental MediaStore, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, and Amazon CloudFront.  

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now allows you to create and manage EKS add-ons using AWS CloudFormation. EKS add-ons provide lifecycle management for Kubernetes operational software, making it easy to consistently start and update common and critical add-on software for your EKS clusters.

AWS Proton now supports tagging of AWS Proton resources and tag-based access control. AWS Proton also tags all provisioned resources automatically with identifiers. You can now group and control your AWS Proton resources using tags, and track down all AWS resources provisioned through AWS Proton, including their costs.  

Amazon Quicksight now supports Sankey diagram. Sankey diagram is used to depict a flow from one set of values to another like customer journey, cash flows, process flow, or analysis of an energy system. For example, a Sankey diagram can show the path a web visitor takes from one page to the next on a company website, with possible stops along the way. See here for more details.

AWS IoT Device Defender now supports AWS CloudFormation for creating and configuring AWS IoT Device Defender resources such as scheduled audits and Security Profiles in a secure, efficient, and repeatable way.

AWS Secrets Manager now enables you to replicate secrets across multiple AWS Regions. You can now give your multi-Region applications access to replicated secrets in the corresponding Regions and rely on AWS Secrets Manager to keep the replicas in sync with the primary secret. This feature abstracts the complexity of replicating secrets across Regions, enabling customers to leverage Secrets Manager to easily manage secrets needed to support their multi-Region applications and disaster recovery strategies. You can use this functionality through the AWS Secrets Manager console, CreateSecret and ReplicateSecretToRegions API, or via AWS CloudFormation to replicate secrets in one or more Regions.

Starting today, AWS Network Firewall is available in the US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Stockholm) AWS Regions.

Starting today, Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS is now available in US West (N. California), US East (Ohio), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt and London), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo) regions.

Amazon EC2 P4d instances which provide the highest performance for machine learning training and high performance computing in the cloud are now available in the US East (Ohio) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.

Change Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now allows you to define multiple, sequential levels of approvals that are required for your operational changes. Change Manager simplifies the way you can request, approve, implement, and report on operational changes to your application configuration and infrastructure on AWS and on-premises. Now, you can further streamline your change approval process by specifying the order in which approvals are required.

Amazon EventBridge now supports API Destinations, a simple and reliable way for customers to send events to any HTTP API, such as self-managed or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, allowing customers to easily extend their existing applications without writing code. Authorization is built in so customers don’t have to write or manage additional code to authorize their requests.

AWS Step Functions now supports YAML state machine definitions within the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code and in AWS CloudFormation, making it possible to define workflows in the same language as your infrastructure as code.

Amazon Redshift RA3.16xlarge and RA3.4xlarge nodes are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. In addition, the smallest RA3 node type, RA3.xlplus, is also now available in five additional AWS regions. RA3.xlplus is now available in Asia Pacific (Singapore, Mumbai) and EU (Frankfurt, London, Stockholm), in addition to the previously available regions Asia Pacific (Seoul, Sydney, Tokyo), Brazil (São Paulo), Canada (Central), EU (Ireland, Paris), US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), and US West (N. California, Oregon).

AWS has updated Serverless Bot Framework, an AWS Solutions Implementation that automatically sets up a chatbot application with sample interactions. This update enables customers to build and iterate on their chatbots faster. The new functionalities help customers scale the use of their chatbots with additional languages and support for more natural conversations.

Customers in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region can now use Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS).

Starting today, you can view all operational issues (OpsItems) for an impacted resource in AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter. OpsCenter allows operations engineers and IT professionals to investigate, diagnose, and resolve operational issues related to AWS resources from a central place. This enables you to understand the greater context while troubleshooting an issue such as an instance failure, and helps you to resolve issues faster.

FreeRTOS is now certified for the Security Evaluation Standard for IoT Platforms (SESIP) Assurance Level 2. With this certification, FreeRTOS libraries have demonstrated meeting a specific set of security criteria for IoT platforms. In addition, embedded developers writing FreeRTOS-based applications can achieve SESIP certification for their own applications more quickly because the underlying libraries have been tested for compliance. According to the technical standards organization GlobalPlatform, SESIP provides a common and optimized approach for evaluating the security of connected products that meets the specific compliance, security, privacy and scalability challenges of the evolving IoT ecosystem. SESIP is based on the industry-established Common Criteria framework.

Driving Digital Transformation with Sitecore is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Slalom, an AWS DevOps Competency and AWS Digital Experience Competency Partner. With the Driving Digital Transformation with Sitecore consulting offer, Slalom leverages Sitecore’s combination of content management, commerce, and customer insights to design and create a complete, customer-centric strategy and solution. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers a customized Sitecore configuration and deployment as well as customer experience strategy, training, and support.

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) now publishes certificate metrics and events through Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon EventBridge. Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates are used to secure network communication and establish the identity of websites over the internet. Certificates have a defined lifetime and for continued use need to be renewed before they expire. These new metrics and events help administrators keep track of certificate expiration dates and take necessary action or configure automation to prevent certificate expiry and related outages.

You can now add four additional metadata fields in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) flow logs, namely flow-direction, traffic-path, pkt-src-aws-service and pkt-dst-aws-service. With these enriched fields you can derive insights into the AWS services that your workloads are communicating with, differentiate between ingress and egress traffic flows and identify the next hop of your egress traffic, such as an internet gateway, a VPC peering connection or a virtual private gateway.

We’re excited to introduce four new digital training offerings that help you learn how to plan, deploy, secure, and manage cloud-based desktops and applications. The offerings are designed for desktop or virtual desktop infrastructure managers, IT administrators, and technical professionals interested in cloud-based virtualization. These free self-paced courses and curriculums include presentations, interactive e-learning modules, videos, demonstrations, and quizzes.

AWS Glue DataBrew extends its datasets to support files without an explicit file extension or a header row. Often times, extensionless files are tricky to work with and require visually exploring the data to understand it. Similarly, customers often work with files without an explicit row that defines the header in the file. In both of these cases, you can now define both these configurations when you create a dataset in DataBrew.

Intelligent SAP Migration and Management on AWS is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Protera, an AWS SAP Competency Partner. Intelligent SAP Migration and Management uses the Protera FlexBridge® platform to speed up your migration, reduce your project risk, and run your SAP environment more efficiently on AWS. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers analysis of existing SAP systems, AWS target architecture design, cost modeling, and migration and management of your SAP environment on AWS.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces general availability of Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain. Ethereum is a popular decentralized blockchain framework that establishes a peer-to-peer network allowing participants to transact without a trusted central authority. It enables popular use cases such as decentralized finance (DeFi), a network of financial applications built on top of blockchain networks. DeFi is different from existing financial networks because it is open and programmable, operates without a central authority, and enables customers to offer new methods for payments, investing, lending and trading. As customers build these Ethereum-based applications, they find it complicated and time-consuming to operate and manage their Ethereum infrastructure. Specific concerns include data reliability due to out-of-sync nodes, data storage scaling challenges, and time-sensitive Ethereum software upgrades.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database by the open source community, we have updated Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition to support PostgreSQL versions 11.9, 10.14, and 9.6.19 in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. These releases contain bug fixes and improvements by the PostgreSQL community.

FreeRTOS Long Term Support (LTS) release 202012.01 now includes the over-the-air update (OTA), AWS IoT Device Defender, and AWS IoT Jobs libraries in the first LTS release (FreeRTOS 202012.00 LTS). With this release, developers can use the FreeRTOS LTS libraries to update firmware, manage device fleets, and monitor fleet metrics for their microcontroller-based IoT devices. In addition, developers can rely on a FreeRTOS version that provides feature stability, and security patches and critical bug fixes for two years.

The Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) console with a new and updated user interface is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon EventBridge now supports propagation of AWS X-Ray trace context, enabling you to view the end-to-end flow of events through your applications. AWS X-Ray traces user requests as they travel through your entire application. It connects and visualizes the data generated by individual services like AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2 and the many resources that make up your application, providing you an end-to-end view of how your application is performing.

We reorganized features on the console based on key tasks such as, writing code, testing, monitoring and configuring. With this update, we reduced the amount of scrolling needed to access common configuration options by creating a dedicated configuration tab. In addition, the new navigation design orients your work on the Lambda console towards the tasks you want to complete and focuses your work around relevant features. This change will also help you find new features more easily when they are available in the console.

AWS AppConfig is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS AppConfig helps you deploy application configurations in a managed and monitored way just like you do with code deployments, but without the need to change the code if a configuration value changes. AWS AppConfig is intended for users who want to quickly and safely deploy changes that are used during runtime of an application or platform. AWS AppConfig is a feature of AWS Systems Manager, which helps you to automate operational tasks across your AWS resources.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports tag-based authorization for easy management of access to configuration APIs that are used for operations such as creating, modifying, or updating Amazon Elasticsearch Service domains.

AWS DeepRacer allows you to get hands-on with machine learning (ML) through a fully autonomous 1/18th scale race car driven by reinforcement learning, a 3D racing simulator on the AWS DeepRacer console, a global racing league, and hundreds of customer-initiated community races. Whether you want to win, or just increase your understanding of machine learning, the AWS DeepRacer League is the best way to get rolling with ML.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles is a feature of Amazon Connect and automatically brings together customer information from multiple applications into a unified customer profile, delivered to agents at the beginning of the customer interaction. It now supports ingestion of customer data from homegrown and third- party applications with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), in addition to existing pre-built connectors for third-party applications like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Marketo.

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports storing your canary run artifacts, including log files, screenshots, and HAR files, in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket in another Region with a new major runtime version, syn-nodejs-puppeteer-3.0. CloudWatch Synthetics now also supports upgraded major versions of the Puppeteer, Chromium, and Node.js dependencies.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is announcing the launch of Asia Pacific (Osaka) as a standard AWS Region, expanding Osaka from its design as a Local Region. The number of Availability Zones (AZs) in Asia Pacific (Osaka) is increasing from one to three, the service portfolio is expanding, and new pricing options are available.

Starting today, AWS Gateway Load Balancer is available in the US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and EU (Frankfurt and Stockholm) regions.  

Starting today, AWS CodePipeline supports 1,000 pipelines per account by default, an increase from the previous limit of 300. You can request a limit increase beyond 1,000 pipelines per Region/Account through the Support Center Console.

Amazon Connect now allows you to separate historical metrics into 15 minute intervals. Historical metrics reports include data about past, completed activity and performance in your contact center. This 15 minute interval provides a new time range to allow more granular insights into queue, routing profile, and agent performance. These insights can be used in variety of ways, which includes improving the accuracy of contact forecasting and staffing plans.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now allows you to implement envelope encryption of Kubernetes secrets using AWS Key Management Service (KMS) keys for existing EKS clusters. Envelope encryption adds an addition, customer-managed layer of encryption for application secrets or user data that is stored within a Kubernetes cluster. Implementing envelope encryption is considered a security best practice for applications that store sensitive data and is part of a defense in depth security strategy.

Today, we are announcing the launch of Real-Time Contact Lens for Amazon Connect in the Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Regions. This expands support for Real-Time Contact Lens from the US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS regions that were launched at re:Invent 2020.